Word: americans
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Sugar-company lawyers puzzled over the law's 66 sections all week, but the key language was unequivocal and plunged Cuba down a land-reform road where many Latin American hopes have been dashed (see box). No corporation can own land in Cuba unless all stockholders are Cuban; no foreigner may buy or inherit land. If U.S. sugar companies do not sell out within a year, their land will be expropriated and paid off in 20-year government bonds bearing 4.5% interest. According to Castro's estimate, made on a television show, the bond payments would range from...
...Sort of Sick." Hardest hit U.S. companies are Atlantica del Golfo (with 500,000 acres), the Rionda group (500,000), Cuban-American Sugar Co. (330,000), United Fruit Co. (270,000). But since the law also prohibits anyone from owning more than 995 acres of farm land or 3,316 acres of ranch land, many Cuban operators will suffer. Castro promised that he will reduce his own family's 2,178-acre farm to the new legal limit...
...basic facts of Latin American land tenure are stark. Less than 5% of Latin America's 8,000,000 square miles is under cultivation, although two-thirds of the 190 million people live from agriculture. Population density is only 24 to the square mile (v. 54 in the U.S.), but millions go hungry. Farm productivity per man-hour is less than one-fifth that of the U.S., food output barely keeps pace with population, and most of the 20 countries must import food...
...cultivated land is largely tied up in latifundios, the big farms that have dominated Latin American agriculture ever since the time of Conquistador Hernan Cortes, who got a royal grant of 100,000 Indians and 25,000 square miles of farmland in 1529. In Venezuela, 3% of the land holders own 90% of the land; in Chile, 2% own 52%; just 2% of the people own half of Brazil...
...dominates Latin America," said a recent U.S. Department of Agriculture study, "has not resulted in a satisfactory adjustment between population and land resources." Pressure has been growing against the latifundios ever since Mexican Revolutionary Emiliano Zapata raised his famous war cry of "land and liberty" in 1910. Many Latin American constitutions nowadays contain a fervent clause about the need for land reform. At a meeting of the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America last week in Panama, the 21 hemisphere nations recommended agrarian reform "whenever appropriate...